Yahoo chief Mayer wants Bing to deliver

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google veteran turned Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer wants Microsoft to deliver when it comes to wresting market share from the Internet company she was part of for more than a decade.

During a talk at a financial analysts conference on Tuesday, Ms Mayer spoke of "nice gains" in revenue from Bing-powered searches at Yahoo! websites but a pressing need for the Microsoft engine to win users from rivals.

Yahoo! inked a 10-year alliance with Microsoft in 2009 to have Bing handle the heavy lifting of mining and indexing the vast array of online data, leaving the California-based Internet pioneer to customize results for users.

"We have to make the alliance work well enough that we are gaining share from the market," Ms Mayer said when asked about the future of the partnership onstage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.